A New Path Forward

~ On My Mind with Laura Ann Reed ~

A few months ago, I found I no longer wanted to write poetry the way I had been writing it.  This was not the result of any systematic evaluation of how I had been writing, or of a consideration of alternatives.

Instead, this came about much like the distaste one acquires for some food that has been, for years, a part of one’s diet.  Say, canned salmon.  Or Brussel sprouts.  And like an aversion to a particular food that suddenly one can’t take another bite of, I stopped writing altogether rather than to make one more poem in the only way I knew how to make them. 

How I suddenly found myself in this dilemma remained baffling for a short period of time.  But I slowly began to understand that a new aesthetic had been forming in my mind ever since I read a certain poem in the Missouri Review, a year earlier.

The author of the piece was interviewed by the journal on how that work came into being, and the interview appeared alongside the poem.

The poem, which was inspired by the writer’s childhood experience of being thrown from a horse, mesmerized me.  Each line was vibrant and pulsating.  There was no filler material between the images, metaphors, and heightened diction.  There was no prose-y narrative.  In the interview, the writer explained that she had initially written the poem in narrative, confessional form, but that it did not satisfy her.

I printed out the poem. I laid it on my writing desk.  I read it every day, aloud as well as in silence.  I was caught in the spell of the writing.  I was obsessed with admiration for, and envy of, the writer who had managed to create such a compelling work of art.

I contacted the writer and asked if she would send me some lines from the original version of the poem.  I needed to know how she had made the leap from the prose of narrative to the poetry of pure lyric.  She most graciously agreed to my request.  But try as I might, I could not discern the flight path she had taken from one version of the piece to the other. 

At a subconscious level, I sensed that I would eventually need to write with a different kind of speech than I had been using in my poems, which was the narrative, confessional voice.

But I had just started to work with a new mentor who used primarily confessional, narrative pieces as teaching models. For a while, I was so busy writing more narrative poems that I managed to partially ignore my changing ideas about what made for powerful and memorable poetry.

Although I was using metaphors and imagery and other lyric effects in my work, these means were held together by passages of prose-y narrative.  I could see how the prose and narrative portions of my poems weakened the aesthetic effects I was after, but I didn’t know any other techniques to use to make my poems cohere.

My dissatisfaction finally reached a level where I had to confront my then-mentor with my need for a new direction.  Because I appreciated his dedication as a teacher and his belief in my talent, this conversation was painful. 

It was made more difficult by the fact that I had not yet brought into full consciousness my need to move away from prose-y narrative into lyric poetry. Because I had not yet articulated this for myself, I couldn’t explain it to him. 

All I knew was that I needed to find a new language for the making of my poems.

And I knew that this language was not the “natural” speech of most narrative poems.   I had become wary of speech that makes our experience simpler than it is, and in doing so, corrodes our experience.

Additionally, I no longer wanted to write confessional poetry, with the ubiquitous “I”.  I wanted to enter into something more expansive than just myself. Something that aspired to dissolve barriers and boundaries between writer and reader.

At that point, serendipity intervened: One of my poems was accepted for publication by the editor of Blue Unicorn, John Hart. 

John suggested eliminating the first two stanzas of the piece he had accepted.  He pointed out how those stanzas, which were narrative, only served as the set-up for the real poem, which was lyric, and which started at stanza three. 

I agreed.  I was excited to see how the poem gained sharpness and strength by axing those two stanzas.

When I learned that in addition to editing the journal, John is a teacher I asked to become his student.  I have been studying with him ever since. 

John teaches a methodology that his father, Lawrence Hart, pioneered back in the 1930’s, and taught for 50 years throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.  When his father died, John took over the Lawrence Hart Institute, including the teaching, which he has now been doing for 40 years.

The goal of the Lawrence Hart methodology is the production of poetry that is characterized by lines that are consistently alive and active.  And by poems that aim to steep the reader in the poet’s felt experience, as opposed describing that experience for the reader.  (Hence the name, the Activist School of Poetry.  Not to be confused with political or social activism.) 

The systematic teaching of the techniques that Lawrence Hart created is at the core of the methodology.   Each technique is to be learned and practiced separately, and then it is to be used in combination with the other techniques.  How each of these techniques is later combined with the others is equally the subject of study. 

Here, at last, were solid techniques that had been developed in a laboratory-type situation: Lawrence Hart’s first students were both guinea pigs and collaborators who tested the efficacy of each of the techniques.  If a technique resulted in active and vibrant lines, and in poems that cohered, it stayed in the repertoire.  If it failed to do so, it was jettisoned.

It may well be that equally rigorous, method-based poetry instruction exists in certain other creative writing programs. But if so, I have yet to hear of them.  

Perhaps my greatest uncertainty about the Lawrence Hart Institute’s curriculum has to do with how the techniques I am learning will come together for me in the end. 

I have not found all the work I’ve seen from the Lawrence Hart Institute’s past students compelling.  Some of the poems I experience as being original, forceful, and moving. Some seem obscure.  To be fair, I have much more limited experience in reading lyric poetry than in reading narrative poetry, and my guess is that some portion of the work that now seems ‘obscure’ will, in time, seem considerably less so.

Then there is the reality of what the majority of journals and presses seek to publish.  Currently, the confessional, narrative style of poetry is more marketable than are the lyric, less accessible forms such as those that come out of the Lawrence Hart Institute’s training. 

However, given the choice between getting my work more widely published and producing work that excites me, I will always opt for the latter.  For others, this may not be the case.

The Lawrence Hart Institute may or may not be the last stop in my journey toward a language that I can use to make a poetry that satisfies me.  But what I have experienced thus far is sufficient to convince me that my present immersion in this methodology is time well spent.

Even the few techniques I’ve learned to date, and am now practicing, have opened possibilities for developing a richer and wilder expressive language than were previously available to me.

Currently I am studying variations of the technique called Direct Sensory Reporting (DSR).  In this technique, the student is to use a highly stripped-down, basic vocabulary to report what comes to the eye. Most students initially tackling this technique don’t realize that this eliminates the reporting of what one knows about what comes to the eye.

DSR is much harder to accomplish than one would think, because so much of what one would normally use to describe a subject is off-limits:  No metaphors, no similes, no comparisons of any kind.  Because all Latin derivatives are essentially metaphors, they cannot be used.  Obviously, no clichés. No conventional, stale, trite descriptors. Nothing one has heard used before.  Only what is there, with the utmost specificity.  A naïve reporting, much like one would hear a very young child use to say what is seen.

What I have found in practicing this technique, is how much richer my actual experience of looking and seeing has become by virtue of being forced to look more closely, and in doing so, learning to “unpack” such words as “curled”, for instance.  Instead of saying a brown leaf on the ground is curled, I might say, a brown leaf on the ground has edges that turn up in some places.

This kind of specificity requires a heightened observation, which, in turn, delivers a higher level of joy to the one looking and seeing.  And it delivers a concomitant jolt of recognition and pleasure in the reader.

A recent poem that I made from DSR lines was published in ONE ART: a journal of poetry.  You can see how the DSR technique can lead to a poetry that is unselfconsciously quiet and contemplative.

Autumn

Beyond a window, a stone’s certain surfaces

are dark with shadow, and each of the three

white blossoms on a rhododendron stem

opens to the wind in a different direction.

From between gray clouds light shines

on a crow’s wing as I turn and turn

in October’s yellow weather.

I am now learning what John Hart calls ‘inflections’ of the DSR lines, with one expressing pleasure (Lyric Effect), one expressing what is strange within the ordinary (Estrangement) and one conveying a sense of suspension in time (Suspension).

Eventually, after I have learned all the techniques and am able to use them effectively in a poem, I will be able to express considerably more than I can in using one single technique. 

However, even now, even using this beginning, basic technique in isolation, I feel that I am made new with every short poem that I write, and I experience a kind of exhilaration in knowing that what I am making is fresh and authentic.

To learn this system of writing, the student must be willing to temporarily put aside previous successes, and to focus instead on being a beginner.

Some find this easier than others.

For me, despite having been relatively successful in seeing my past poems published, it was not painful to relinquish my former way of writing.  I was not experiencing deep satisfaction from it, nor was I excited by it. I was not learning new things from the poems I was writing. Or not enough new things.  I was not being changed.

I was willing and ready, as Mark Danowsky put it, to push the “re-set button”. 

I think of Rilke’s famous line in the poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”:

You must change your life.

At some level, I think I must have been receiving that directive for a while, until I had no choice but to say, Yes.

I think that’s how it works for everyone. In the field of psychology, it’s a truism that people do not change in significant ways until they become sufficiently uncomfortable doing what they’ve always done.  I reached that level of discomfort with how I had been writing, so that making a change came as a vast relief.

For those interested in learning more about the Lawrence Hart Institute’s methodology and philosophy, please see the link below.

https://lawrencehart.org/theory-method/

For those wishing to inquire about John Hart’s seminars and his one-on-one mentoring, he can be contacted at the following email address:

staff@lawrencehart.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as Leadership Development Trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.